In regenerative medicine performed to treat diseases by using cells of patients themselves or others, cells collected from living bodies are used for transplantation therapy after being cultured to increase their number or formed into a desired tissue form. The culturing of cells to be used for therapy should be performed in a cell culturing clean room called “Cell Processing Center (CPC)” in accordance with Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP). The problems here are that the preparation of cells for one patient requires much effort and cost and that there is a biological contamination risk, both because cell culturing is performed manually by technical experts.
As the means for solving these problems, a system that automates cell culture processes in a closed system has been developed. By using a closed-system culture container which does not need an operation for opening/closing a lid of the culture container, the cell culture process can be automated, and the biological contamination risk can be reduced.
The major operations that are manually operated at the time of the culturing are a cell seeding operation for feeding a liquid culture medium in which cells are suspended to a culture dish and an operation for exchanging the liquid culture medium which is regularly performed during cell culturing. In the manual operation, a predetermined amount of liquid is collected by using a measuring pipette or a dispenser used by attaching a disposable dispensing tip, and the liquid is added from the liquid culture medium in the liquid bottle to the culture dish. Dispensing includes the two operations of collecting a predetermined amount of the liquid and delivering it to an objective location.
In an automated culture apparatus, there is a method for mechanizing a dispenser in the same manner and linking the manual operation, the pipetting and the movement operation in the same manner to perform the addition of a liquid as seen in Patent Literature 1, but the apparatus increases in size from the necessity for placing the entire apparatus in an aseptic environment. However, when using a pump in a dispensing operation, there is a method for connecting the space from the liquid bottle to the culture dish with a throw-away tube, and simultaneously performing feeding of a constant amount by the pump as seen in Patent Literature 2. In this case, if the inside of the tube in which the liquid is fed can be maintained in an aseptic state, the automated apparatus can be miniaturized.